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I met Jeanne Simons, the founder of the Linwood Children's Center for Autistic Children in Ellicott City in 1983, when I was entrusted with the job to help tease out and describe the different elements of the methods she had developed to successfully educate...

I first became aware of the work of Ilia Zdanevich while searching libraries and archives to study the typography of 20th-century avant-garde Dada and Futurist poets through their manuscripts and printed ephemera. But my research on Iliazd brought me into...

The pandemic has wiped out our social lives and the approaching election is dominating our political awareness. Dire straits for some of us. But an opportune time to start thinking seriously about what you really, truly want our presidents to be and to do for...

Somehow, without quite meaning to, I’ve become a sort of de facto travel agent to the (literary) stars. It all began in 2010 with my sixth book, Lighting Out for the Territory: How Samuel Clemens Headed West and Became Mark Twain, which concerned the...

Emily Folger née Jordan was a bluestocking: an educated, intellectual woman with a scholarly bent. In 1875, she followed her two sisters to Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. Elected president for life of her class of 36 women, she went home to Brooklyn...

Shakespeare collector Henry Clay Folger and President Calvin Coolidge were 6th cousins, once removed; surely they never knew it. They both graduated with a B. A. degree from Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts; Folger in 1879, Coolidge in 1895. They...

A few years ago it suddenly hit me that, as an historian of the nineteenth century, I hadn’t been doing a very good job. Or rather, I had done only half a job. Because while I had been diligent in finding out everything there was to know about the intellectual...

In his youth, William James tried on a range of career possibilities. In the 1860s, his attention was focused on a career in science. He had spent his childhood in a host of schools on both sides of the North Atlantic guided by his father, Henry James, Senior...

Guest post by Louis Carlat "There is no such thing in anyone's life as an unimportant day," said American essayist Alexander Woollcott. Anything might happen. But of course, some days turn out to be more important than others. With the publication of its...

Guest post by Ronald S. Coddington After my second book, Faces of the Confederacy, debuted in 2008, colleagues and friends asked me about my next project. I answered that African American soldiers would be the focus of my next volume. My reply was met with a...